Better Hiring, Part 1

In this post I over-indulge in aquatic metaphors to dissect remote-first hiring and lament the lack of consideration for soft-skills in tech.

This week I would like to discuss hiring, which Laszlo Bock, ex-head of Google’s People Operations team, in his seminal book Work Rules!, describes as the single most important people activity in any organization.

Prior to diving into this subject, I want to express my gratitude to the hundreds of kind people who read last week’s post Life, a Work in Progress, and to the dozens who took the time to show appreciation on LinkedIn.

Thank you - your response was the most amazing and unexpected 49th birthday gift.

As a prologue to this post, I want to share the story of my humble beginnings as a hiring manager. It was in 1994, the year Forrest Gump was released in theaters. I was a 23 y/o recent graduate, founder of a startup of one, looking for a salesperson because I was too shy and introverted to get out of the building and talk to actual customers.

I posted the job in the employment section of the local newspaper with a stirring text: “New tech company is looking for a salesperson. Good salary. Please fax CV to 032-xxx-xx-xx”. Unsurprisingly, interest was limited at best and I didn’t run out of fax paper that week.

Eventually, I had an interview scheduled with a candidate from out of town. I didn’t shave for days to look older and re-arranged the office furniture so that I appeared to lead a busy, thriving business. Then the day came and the candidate parked his enormous navy blue BMW outside of the office and walked in. I was awed.

I started with the only interview line I knew, “please tell me about yourself”, and took notes fiercely to look competent. I was very impressed by the candidate’s impeccable credentials gained working for major companies. I made him a generous offer.

The next day he called me back and rejected my offer, stating that he’d prefer to keep cashing in unemployment checks rather than having to work for me. And he hung up.

Not the best of starts.

Twenty-six years and hundreds of interviews later, I selected hiring as the topic for this second post because I firmly believe that Bock was right when he wrote: “superb hiring (…) is about finding the very best people who will be successful in the context of your organization, and who will make everyone around them more successful”. There is hardly any business activity of equal impact.

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Photo of the Week

Traveling from San Francisco to Colombia, there’s a high probability you’ll experience a layover at Tocumen airport in Panama, and if you sit on the left side of the airplane, you’ll see a legion of ships lining up to enter the Panama Canal.

A little known fact is that Panama used to be a province of Colombia until the US conveniently recognized the country’s independence and set out to complete the canal construction work left unfinished by the French.

There’s an abundance of tour options to visit the Miraflores Locks starting from the airport, giving you a unique opportunity to witness the carefully orchestrated passage of gargantuan vessels from one ocean to another.

This photo taken in 2013 - when I obviously hadn’t yet discovered the joy of image post-processing using Lightroom - is an appropriate metaphor for the hiring process. There are a few reasons for this

1. Hiring at scale, as we do at Twilio, would be impossible without a close collaboration between sourcing specialists, recruiters, hiring managers, bar raisers, etc. This is teamwork at its best. Coincidentally, there’s a good, albeit short, description of how a startup recruiting organization scales over time in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook.

2. The hiring manager is the captain of the ship and must own the recruiting process with the benevolent guidance from the talent acquisition (TA) team: TA is acting like the pilots of the Panama Canal to ensure a reliable outcome. This in practice means that an experienced hiring manager

   • Actively helps with sourcing, go on Linkedin Recruiter to discover great candidates, and write them a personal note that will increase the likelihood of a response. She’ll also be resourceful and use referrals, meetups, all hands events - any opportunity really - to pitch her job openings. I have observed that hiring manager involvement is a decisive success factor when recruiting senior engineering staff.

   • Is knowledgeable about all the key facets of the hiring process: job leveling, salary bands, location-specific talent pool strengths vs weaknesses, process requirements (e.g. diversity exception requests), etc. Failure to navigate through all these pitfalls can set back hiring by months.

   • Scrutinizes the candidates pipeline like a hawk, keeping an eye out for any bottleneck that could delay the process and makes certain there are enough qualified applicants moving through the stages to comfortably fill the vacancy.

This final point covers one of my remaining shortcomings as a hiring manager: I have a penchant for betting the house on too few late-stage candidates, and if they fall through, I face the daunting prospect of having to reboot the entire process - which is quite time-consuming.

With this metaphorical introduction complete, let’s sail away on an adventure where I’ll endeavor to reveal some vital lessons I learned as a hiring manager in the stormy waters of the tech industry.

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Picking a Location

I consider myself a citizen of the world and my life journey starting up companies in four countries backs this claim. Training sessions designed to reduce our unconscious biases as hiring managers - including gender, race, and generally affinity biases - are incredibly useful, but in my opinion lack a fundamental component: location bias.

Nobody will dispute that a fixed mindset slows down progress, yet many leaders will be remarkably biased when it comes to hiring outside their physical office location. Even ultra-open, ultra-smart and ultra-progressive Twilio remained essentially a San Francisco-centric shop until around 2015 - and I couldn’t get a job with the company I loved because I was unwilling to relocate to the Bay Area and they were unprepared to hire a remote-first employee.

Until COVID made Work From Home (WFH) a necessity for tech employees fortunate enough to have that option, my stance that remote-first is the future of work had a flavor of peril and anti-conformism akin to crossing the Caribbean on a pirate ship in the 17th century. Nevertheless, I felt I was in good company under the same skull and crossbones banner as Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, a long-time distributed work activist.

For now, I would encourage you to ponder on these propositions and remove any location bias prior to deciding where your next hire should work from:

1. Talent is global, though it is unevenly distributed. Twilions have become used to my energetic waving of the Colombian flag on any occasion. Our crew of less than a dozen in Bogota has grown to over 80 employees in four years, proving there’s abundant talent in the Andean nation. To hire Java or JavaScript developers, QA or tech support engineers, Colombia is a great destination. However, if you’re looking for senior engineering leaders with over a decade in experience, Colombia can’t hold a candle to the US or India, simply because there was little to no IT industry here 10 years ago, except for agencies and corporate IT departments. Just realize that your home turf may not be the most fertile ground to grow a team.

2. Remote first is the new normal. During a game of squash with a teammate in Mexico, I heard that he was commuting four hours through brutal traffic every day. I was devastated to hear that! It was never my intention to impose such inhumane work conditions on anyone. However, this conversation took place in 2006 when neither Zoom nor Slack had been founded and effective remote working over the Internet wasn’t practical. The world has changed. A recent study found that 32% of US workers would prefer to be fully remote and 34% stated they would be more likely to apply to jobs that offer the option to work remotely. Moving forward, at a minimum consider posting remote-first jobs to attract talent that is otherwise difficult to source locally.

3. WFH doesn’t undermine trust and collaboration. WFH has been the norm for most Twilions since March 2020 - with solid results. Automattic, Matt Mullenweg’s company, has over 1,100 employees working from more than 62 countries, and no physical headquarters. Many tech startups had a bias for locking up their best developers together into an enclosed sweatshop and feeding them pizza until they hit the release date (or not). If you fancy reading an entertaining account of heroic game development, I highly recommend Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - but keep in mind this was set in the 90s. Modern Agile frameworks like Scrum foster active participation and continuous feedback. Autonomous small teams will gel together and deliver prodigious value if you keep all developers within a few contiguous timezones and hire managers who are keen to learn how to become long-distance leaders (which incidentally is the title of a book sitting in my reading queue).

Stop being shackled to your old location biases and embrace a new world of hiring opportunities. Oh, and if you’re an entrepreneur, think of setting up your next remote-first team in Colombia - I’d be delighted to help you with some advice.

Wise Job Descriptions

The Twilio Magic emphasizes the importance of Writing it Down. That company value seemed quite mundane to me initially, but now I see it as a constant reminder that it is essential for me to think more deeply about any task awaiting me and clear up my mind before jumping into action. And this applies perfectly to job descriptions.

To recruit the ideal person for a job you must devote enough time to clearly frame what type of unique background, experience, skills, etc. will make a new employee and the team she will be joining insanely successful.

This exercise goes beyond merely stating the obvious: “you are a senior engineering manager who has experience leading software development teams and is familiar with Agile processes” (Zzzz). That snippet is describing a peg that can fit into a multitude of holes, not a unique individual that has polished her trade for years and who needs to fuse into the complex structure of your organization.

Don’t make the mistake to kick off a screening process before gaining a profound understanding of how your team truly ticks. Some valuable questions you may want to ask yourself when recruiting engineering leaders are:

• If you develop products, what sort of candidates would have experience making the correct tradeoffs between product increment quality, delivery schedule compliance, and developer skills growth? That type of experience takes years to acquire. For example, projects undertaken by agencies are strongly influenced by finite time horizons and constrained customer budgets. On the other hand, Twilio teams have to live with the consequences of their design and coding choices for months or years while being on call. This breeds a very different attitude toward tech debt for instance.

• Some aspects of your team culture may be precious and fragile, like Venetian glass, the result of years of ceaselessly encouraging a certain set of behaviors. Blameless post-mortems, inclusive retrospective meetings, and bias-free performance reviews can be subtly undermined by a leader who lacks some critical soft-skills. Identify and communicate those to your interview panel in order to detect red flags early. You may also notice that the current template for Twilio job descriptions draws attention to the Twilio Magic.

These two examples weren’t selected at random - they represent qualities that take time to mature, like the finest bottles of Burgundy wine. Whereas we have the luxury of nurturing and guiding those new recruits who join us from university and will become the leaders of tomorrow, our experienced hires must be able to ramp up and lead in a shorter period of time.

In summary, the hours you invest in crafting a well thought out job description are hours well spent.

Soft Skills Matter

Year: 2007. Location: the vibrant capital of Mexico. Back then, I was desperate to hire a developer with a highly specialized skill set to implement distributed systems in C/C++ for the startup I had co-founded. Due to time pressure, I offered the job to someone who passed our stringent coding tests, ignoring several red flags about his behavior.

Over time, he adopted two worrisome habits: living day and night in the dark basement where our office was located and disregarding all code reviews. Eventually, he vanished without a word, fleeing to the US after locking us out of the SVN source code repository and production servers. Fortunately, the saga ended up amicably. However, all I developed for several days was a nasty ulcer.

Fast forward to 2018. Jeff, Twilio’s fearless leader, invited Danny Meyer, the famous CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) and founder of Shake Shack, for a fireside chat. Their conversation was a revelation of the power of hospitality in any business - and his book Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business became one of my all-time favorite reads.

I feel that the hiring process of prominent tech companies (most notably some FANG giants) lacks a key ingredient: more emphasis on soft-skills - especially for engineering positions where teamwork is so critical to our success. Perhaps this is because of Silicon Valley’s scale and metrics-obsessed culture, which has a hard time grappling with something that cannot be efficiently measured.

I fear that over-indexing on hard-skills in an industry as powerful as ours will have far-reaching consequences. There’s no denying that Facebook is built on a platform that’s a jewel of engineering at scale, yet the tech behemoth does little to address a myriad of issues resulting from near-universal use of the social media services it’s created.

In contrast, Danny Meyer’s hiring method complements the conventional technical skills evaluation with a “Hospitality Quotient” (HQ) that’s designed to tip the scale in terms of company culture. Although there’s no HQ score per se at USHG, they do teach people on their team how to interview for those emotional skills, which are

• Kindness and Optimism: “We work long hours, and I want to be surrounded by friendly, hopeful people. Skeptics rarely work out well on our team.”

• Intellectual Curiosity: “You look at every day as an opportunity to learn something new. If we’re going to be on that road to excellence, we better have people that actually care about learning.”

• Work Ethic: “It’s not enough just to be able to teach you how to do something. You’ve got to care about doing that job as well as it can be done.”

• Empathy: “I define empathy in the way that a boat has a wake in its path. Someone who’s highly empathetic is not only aware of the wake that [they’re] leaving in [their] path, but cares. How do you make people feel as you go through life?”

• Self-Awareness: “Self-awareness is knowing what your own personal weather report is on any given day. We all wake up, some days feeling sunny and 72[…] Some days it’s hot and humid, some days it’s stormy. You’re not a bad person on those stormy days, but you should know it and you should do something about it.”

• Integrity: “Having the judgment to do the right thing even when it’s not in your own self-interest and even when no one else is looking.”

If you are a Twilion, you may have recognized a piece of Twilio Magic in this last soft-skill: No Shenanigans. Likewise, USHG’s Work Ethic and Twilio’s Don’t Settle are closely related. When your company culture overlaps with essential soft-skills you create ripe conditions for attracting talent that will blossom and create a flywheel of positive emotions in the workplace.

As a sideline, Work Ethic is often taken for granted - or regarded as unfashionable - but the vast majority of the employees I was forced to manage out during my career were struggling in that compartment of their game.

When you brief your interview panel (and you should use one if you aren’t already), make sure your team members are aware of what soft-skills matter the most in your organization and can raise a red flag if a candidate exhibits behavioral anti-patterns.

An Elephant in the Interview Room

Back then, when I was a young and arrogant entrepreneur, I thought I had a magic touch for recruiting exceptional talent (this was well after the salesperson fiasco). I never hired the wrong candidate - and my code never failed either. I was unaware of all my biases and blind spots, chiefly an infatuation with eloquent communicators that made me overlook their technical weaknesses.

The parable of Blind Men and an Elephant teaches us that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience. This is why a panel that will assess candidates from multiple perspectives - and a system - are fundamental to support an effective screening process.

An interview panel for a leadership position must be diverse, have well-defined - complementary - focus areas, and include some team members who will work with the new hire, such as:

• A senior engineer or tech lead, to evaluate the technical chops of the manager. I do not advocate standardized tests that force candidates to regurgitate popular system design solutions or implement an algorithm to reverse a linked list. Each team has a unique bar in terms of technical proficiency required to be successful and will fine-tune questions accordingly.

• Another engineering manager, to go deep into the team leadership experience of the applicant, how she’s helped her team grow in capability, what mental models she used to tackle those difficult tradeoffs, etc.

• A product manager, because the engineering manager is also a close partner in the product design and implementation process. The ability to Wear the Customer’s Shoes is highly prized at Twilio.

• Bar raisers are a rather recent addition to our interview panels. As Twilions of significant tenure in the company and also role models for the Twilio Magic, they focus on maintaining a high bar for all our new hires.

My hiring philosophy echoes Laszlo Bock’s - “hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way” and “taking your time”. This requires teamwork, like with shepherding container ships across the Miraflores Locks.

Our screening process is complex and I suspect somewhat proprietary. I don’t want any trouble with HR, so suffice to say that we make heavy use of a library of pre-defined questions related to the Twilio Magic, take copious notes with specific insights about candidates, and make a clear hire / no hire decision - no sitting on the fence allowed.

Precap meetings are of paramount importance to ensure all the panelists are aligned on the questions they will be asking. A good panel will mercilessly poke holes into a poor job description - and as a hiring manager, I’m grateful to perform a modest rewrite instead of committing the panel into a half-baked screening process.

Recaps are facilitated by the bar raisers and involve spirited debates. I still feel some trepidation before discovering the thumbs up or down ratings from all the panel members in Greenhouse. Experiencing relief when others found clear red flags in a candidate I had rated strongly is definitely a learned reaction - acceptance that the collective wisdom of the panel is superior to my own limited view.

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I can’t do justice to a subject as broad as hiring in a single post - and neither will my family allow me to blog during the entire weekend. Therefore I’m going to leave these topics for a follow-up post:

• The dark side of coding tests, like Hackerrank

• Boosting diversity, a big problem in tech

• Onboarding at scale during COVID

Do not hesitate to leave comments if you want me to examine other hiring-related challenges - or if you vehemently disagree with my take on any topic.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this far. This blog is a foray into the unknown for me, the first time ever I’m writing for more than a singleton readership.